Tipsheet

Biden Says As President He Would Come For 'Assault Weapons'

Democrats want to come for your guns and they aren’t hiding it anymore. Former Vice President Joe Biden said as much on CNN Monday with Anderson Cooper.

Discussing his support for a national buyback program of “assault weapons,” the Democratic presidential candidate said that if elected, he is “going to come” for them.

“So to gun owners out there who say well, a Biden administration means they’re going to come for my guns,”  Cooper said to Biden, who interjected: “Bingo. You’re right if you have an assault weapon.”

“The fact of the matter is they should be illegal, period,” he added. “Look, the Second Amendment doesn’t say you can’t restrict the kinds of weapons people can own. You can’t buy a bazooka. You can’t have a flame thrower. The guys who make these arguments are the people who say, ‘The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots. We need the protection against the government.’”

Cooper then pressed Biden about how he’d go about dealing with the “assault weapons” people already own.

“What I would do is try to — I would institute a national buyback program and I move in the direction of making sure that that in fact was what we tried to do, get them off the street,” Biden answered. 

Cooper pointed out that that was not confiscation, and Biden then acknowledged there's no way to legally confiscate them right now.

“That’s not walking into their homes, knocking on their doors, going through the gun cabinets,” Biden said.

“Right now there is no legal way to deny them the right if they legally purchased them but we can in fact make a major effort to get them off the street and out of the possession of people,” he added.